Thursday, October 13, 2011

I Read This--THE NEW TEEN TITANS OMNIBUS Vol. 1

A man's first Ominbus is a much cherished moment. After all, one so rarely gets books large, ungainly and heavy enough to double as a murder weapon, should the need arise. The New Teen Titans Omnibus Vol. 1 is such a book, weighing in at a hefty 686 pages, I imagine I could easily bludgeon someone to death with it, if I so chose.

It's especially pronounced around the late 70's/Early 80's. You have Firestorm, which is DC doing the Spider-Man formula in all but name. You have All-Star Comics and later All-Star Squadron which fill in the history of the JSA, helmed primarily by Roy Thomas who had just come from Marvel and did, among other things, fill in their Golden Age history.

And you had the New Teen Titans, which, in many ways, copied the approach that made X-Men a top-selling book. Indeed, one of the biggest guaranteed argument starters back in the day was whether or not NTT ripped off X-Men. I'm not going to pry that can of worms open again, but it's something worth thinking about. I wouldn't necessarily say that they straight up ripped it off, only that there is a similar approach at work.

Because both books made their successes by following the . . .er, following formula. You take a cult hit book that's been on the shelf for a few years. Add in a few new characters, but keep a few of the old ones around as a link to the previous history of the title (also providing grist for the mill for stories) Bring in characters from other forgotten books--it changes the team dynamic and allows you to fold in plotlines from their other books. Then add in some new characters that can generate stories of their own. Mix it all together by plotting in the following way: Small one-issue plots become larger extended plots that weave in and out of the book, creating an extended soap-opera-ish narrative where one feels like there is a living world in this book and anything can happen.

And it goes without saying, add in some mind control and domination stuff. I had forgotten NTT did that a lot, but, well . . .George Perez, y'know.

In any event, it was 1980, and DC was still smarting from its last attempt to expand their market share (the "DC Implosion") and were at the time time getting quite an influx of people coming over from Marvel again who weren't happy with the way things were across the street. Into our story comes Marv Wolfman (creator of, among other things, Nova, and former Editor in Chief of Marvel comics back when it seems the only criteria for being EIC was "be the 10th caller") and George Perez, who was well-regarded but not quite a superstar just yet, mostly because the hallmarks of the George Perez style (insane detail, huge elaborate panels stocked with characters) weren't quite coming together as they should.

(In fact, as an aside and because I have no other place to put this thought, Perez's work is very dependent on who is inking him at this stage of things. Perez and Pablo Marcos tends to soften his details down but not in a bad way--just in a way that calls to mind his Fantastic Four and Marvel Two-in-One work, where his Kirby influence seemed to have a bit more sway. Dick Giordano, who inks the teaser comic that opens the book subsumes a lot of his detail with his thin and somewhat angular ink lines. His longest serving partner on this run of the book, Romeo Thangal, finds a happy medium and really enhances his sense of detail)

So DC gave them a book, the New Teen Titans, and Wolfman and Perez both figured it probably wouldn't run more than six issues and so decided to just have fun with the six issues they had and do they book they wanted to do. And so, without any sort of strict editorial guidance (obviously, this would never happen today) New Teen Titans was sent out into the world . . .

. . .and soon enough found its audience and became the DC's big breakout hit. Not bad for something that even the people working on it thought only had six months to live, eh?

Our Omnibus here covers the first two years of the book and yes, I promise we're getting to the meat and potatoes in a bit. But before we do that, let's get to know our Titans in a segment the longtime readers of this blog (the ONLY readers of this blog) know well. ROLL CALL!

ROBIN--You might remember him from being Batman's sidekick. Robin is the glue that holds the team together, and for the purpose of this book, functions as the only "normal" one that everyone else is allowed to be crazy around (The Dave Foley, if you will) Is typically most consumed with proving himself to Batman, a little thing which culminates years later when he finally steps into the role of Nightwing.

WONDER GIRL--Before she became a continuity nightmare (but not too far from that) Wonder Girl was the ultility infielder for the Titans in that she had no real extant drama (er, yet) and she had enough time as a member of the Titans and was enough of a blank slate with a connection to Wonder Woman's mythos that would allow for story potential and ultimately, her death from Mystery Collapse disorder.

She also dated Terry Long, who made his first appearance in this. I'd like to thank the Internet for beating the "Terry Long is a creep" meme into the ground so this is the extent that I have to talk about that douchebag.

KID FLASH--Wally West runs very fast, and is sort of the odd man out, as he is manipulated on to the team at first, has a thing for Raven that never quite goes anywhere, and generally seems to the member most intent on getting out as soon as is convenient. That's not a knock against his character--he has some good bits in the book, but he's one of the thinnest-drawn characters in the team.

CYBORG--One of our brand-new characters, Cyborg is . . .an interesting case. For one thing, he's a pretty powerful character, unusual when you consider the most powerful black guy in the Titans last go-round only had a trumpet. Cyborg is estranged from his father because his father made him into a cyborg after he'd Tampered With Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and his son got crippled. Cyborg is a genius and a super-athlete and plays the role of the malcontent in the team, as he's not 100% on board with joining the Titans, or at least he says he is.

STARFIRE--The Red Monika of her day, Starfire is cute and has boobs and George Perez unmistakably loves drawing her, as a casual flip-through of this book will tell you. She also flies around and wants to kill people, but never really seems to do that successfully. It's rescuing her that actually pulls the trigger on the Titans uniting, and her back-story actually proved sturdy enough that the Omega Men ended up spinning off outta this. If you don't know who the Omega Men are I . . .can't really help you, as I never figured that book out.

RAVEN--Has Raven ever not been a problematic character? Because she's always seemed so to me. She's committed to an extreme sort of total pacifism but is not above manipulating other people to do her fighting for her, has powers that 30 years in continue to be pretty ill-defined, and, well, she really doesn't do all that much on her own, as we'll see.

CHANGELING--At first, Changeling seems like the most irritating comic relief character there could ever be, but scratch the surface and you see dude has a really shit life. Former member of the Doom Patrol that he is, Changeling has already seen his biological parents die, his adoptive parents die, and his stepfather routinely lose his fucking shit and turn evil. He's the Shinji Ikari of the DC Universe, if Shinji Ikari had been crossed with a third-rate Borscht Belt comedian.

Our story opens with a 16-page teaser from DC Comics Presents. These little tipped-in books were kind of a cool gimmick to trail new series, and I'm sure paper considerations would make something like this impossible today, but it was a damn good idea, really. Anyways, the teaser opens with Robin tripping balls as he seems to be simultaneously helping save S.T.A.R labs from a hostage crisis and fighting a big slimy monster at the same time. Needless to say he's a little bit confused, but it's a handy way for the team to show up as a unit, show off its powers, and set up an interesting paradox--Robin and co form the team as much because they've already seen the team together.

Our first issue opens with the Titans uniting to free Starfire from the Gordanians, which somehow covertly ended up becoming the DCAU's standard aliens, but sometime, apparently it happened. Early on we get sketches of what everyone's role is going to be on the team--Changeling cracks jokes, Cyborg complains, Raven pulls the strings and never seems to do anything, and Robin holds it all together. This would probably take six issues today, I'll bet.

Incidentally, while they're fighting the Gordanians, they wreck the apartment of Grant Wilson, who is tight with the H.I.V.E. one of the dozens of villainous conspiracies which were stalking around the DCU at the time. Grant volunteers for the H.I.V.E. to give him superpowers, only he's a bit of a reckless tool and gets himself killed forcing Deathstroke the Terminator, the guy the H.I.V.E. wanted to hire in the first place. The particular plate will be kept spinning in a direct sense through the next 40+ issues of the book as Deathstroke, the H.I.V.E. and the Titans fight in various permutations off and on.

Issue three introduces us to the Fearsome Five, a group of . . .shall we say third-rate villains led by Dr. Light before he was all rape-happy. While this initially seems just a mere stunt to make sure the book has an action sequence, it's actually tying into the main plot for the first six-issue arc.

We find out in issue four that Psimon of the Fearsome Five is an agent of Raven's father, a rather goofy looking demon named Trigon. This leads in a roundabout way to two major things--the Titans fighting the Justice League of America and having their big "we're not like you" statement of purpose, and Zatanna revealing that Raven has been manipulating the team to fight Trigon since the beginning, up to an including making Kid Flash fall in love with her. Naturally, this causes the team to dissolve just when they're needed most.

Curt Swan shows up to do one chapter of this story, I should mention, which is an interesting clash of styles considering all that happens in this arc. Since I'm talking of things I miss that they don't do in comics nowadays, I kinda miss the whole "use the splash page a summary/teaser for the main story" thing. It's kind of cool.

In any event, as befitting such a problematic character as Raven, her backstory is equally headache-inducing: Trigon raped her mom, who fell through the cracks of the social safety net (Regan was really hard on that "demon rape recovery for unwed mothers" program) and got spirited away to a magic land of sanctimonious pacifists who swear to defend the universe against Trigon, but don't really want to, y'know, do anything.

Trigon isn't much better. Apparently he can crush universes, and has phenomenal power and all that, but really doesn't do much with it short of act like a dickhead and shoot rays at people. He sorta works as a uniting force for this story, because all he has to do is show up in the final act, look super-scary, get defeated, and end the arc.

Unfortunately, they kept bringing him back to diminishing returns, which was kind of a continuing problem with the Titans. The strength of the book, like X-Men, was the fact that they had a set number of plates they kept spinning--if you hopped off for a bit and hopped back on when, say Deathstroke came back, you could be brought up to speed with a minimum of fuss, because everything just goes 'round and 'round and that's . . .OK.

For a while.

The problem comes in which you don't change up the plates. X-Men under Claremont finally fell in on itself for me personally because I could not stand to read one more story about the Marauders or the Shadow King or Genosha . . .I had seen that come around so many times I knew just what to expect and I did not want any more. Titans undergoes a similar disintegration, and Wolfman's final issues, which are maybe 15 years from these early days are just . . .embarrassing because of how obviously they're just running on fumes at that point.

But that's the future. Let's get back to the now. The Fearsome Five show up again at the conclusion of the Trigon arc to do that old beloved classic: Turning the heroes headquarters against them (man, given how many times this happens, you really wonder about superhero real estate. It's like fucking poltergeists, only so much worse) positively ancient villain The Puppeteer returns for some mind control shenanigans, and the Deathstroke pops back up to rope the Titans into his plan to pay the H.I.V.E. back for killing his son, among other things. Oh, and Deathstroke kills Changeling, more or less.

But that's just a means to get us to the next big plot--the New Teen Titans vs. the Titans of Greek Myth. This, uh . . .wow. Wonder Girl gets a Titanic mickey slipped to her and becomes the love-slave of one of the Titans (although given the competition is Terry Long, this may or may not be a step up) and it's up to the Titans plus the Amazons, then finally the Olympian gods themselves, to beat back the Titans.

The problem with all this is that it's not terribly exciting (and sadly, it seems Perez did not get that memo) and the Teen Titans are kind of sidelined as Greek gods fight other different Greek gods and there's some baffelgab about free will and no one really ever raises their hands and says "Hey man, that shit with Wonder Girl being a love slave is foul," which I feel is a missed opportunity of sorts. It tries for an epic feel, but can't really close the deal, possibly because it's too far afield from where Titans works best, which is a more earthbound milieu.

Thankfully, the next extended storyline works far, far better, as the Titans get drawn into the search for the Doom Patrol and end up in a battle between a number of their old foes. This is the intro of the New Brotherhood of Evil (Don't worry--they still have the French gorilla) who go on to become recurring nemeses.

It's a pretty decent story, as Changeling actually gets to purge some demons he's been dragging around (and create a few more as he relentlessly pursues the people who took his family from him and he's willing to kill them for doing so) and we get a story that could have easily have been a "Doom Patrol story in all but name but done here because that's the book Wolfman's writing" made to fit with the Titans milieu a lot better than the Titans of Myth arc does.

A few done-in-ones close out the first 20 issues of New Teen Titans. They're . . .okay, and quite necessary after the Titans of Myth and Doom Patrol stories, as we needed a good stretch of time where we could get closer to the cast and feel a bit more grounded, as it's a danger with Constant! Epic! Action! that it's also meant to be more than constant epic action.

The final four issues in the Omnibus is the 4-issue Tales of the New Teen Titans mini-series, which provided expanded origin stories for Cyborg, Raven. Changeling, and Starfire. It also provided George Perez a chance to collaborate with a couple of great artists who inked his pencils. The Changeling issue features Gene Day inks (it was one of his last jobs before he died, sadly) and it is an incredible combination and makes me wish that 1) They'd been able to do more stuff together and 2) More people knew how good Gene Day was. While these issues were generally in the business of filling out the backstories of the lesser established characters, they also function as teasers for newer plot elements that will eventually filter back into the main book.

So . . .being we're talking about a book that is 31 years old, the question must be . . .do they hold up? And the answer is . . .well, sorta. Wolfman has a reputation for writing melodramatically and really shoveling on the purple prose and that is not an undeserved charge. However, Chris Claremont was doing the exact same thing across the street on X-Men and both books were selling quite well, so obviously that was what people wanted to read back then. Despite that handicap, these books have a tremendous energy--Wolfman and Perez did 6 issues of whatever they wanted figuring they had nothing to lose, and the book reflects that. Compare the joy and excitement these first six issues of New Teen Titans have with six issues of the latest book to spin out of a crossover or editorial diktat, and see which one feel less like work to get through.

There's a feeling of boundless possibility here, and being this is the early years of the run we're far away from the stuff that would finally kill the book--the repeating plots, the whole Baxter Paper bullshit, etc. Believe it or not, the notion of superhero comics universes being tightly vertically integrated things with ironclad canons was actually a fairly late development in the history of superhero comics--this book and All-Star Comics treat a superhero universe with 50 years (at the time) of accumulated history as a great big toybox to play in, and don't sweat things like making sure ever story lines up with every other one--there is an effort made to keep everything consistent, and the rest is just there to have fun with. There's a freedom in these stories that is almost unheard of in today's books.

It was nice to revisit this time and these characters and have it still have a certain charm even now. As to the rest of y'all, well, just remember: oftimes nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

6 comments:

Man, I have been meaning to comment on this one and just hadn't. Time to fix that

You know, it's interesting you bring up the "running six issues" idea, because I dunno if that is based on interviews or just your own deduction but it feels...right. Looking over the run, that's almost exactly where I stopped following the book on a regular basis. I won't presume to know why at this late date, since I would have been all of 8 at the time.

HOWEVER, it's not far-fetched when you bring it up. The (dis)advantage Teen Titans had over X-Men is that it already HAD a revival that had died a quick death in 76-78. I mean, that book was getting canned regardless of whether the Implosion had happened later or not. I am pretty sure there was only a new Titans book because Marv asked for it. It's a testament that DC really wanted him, since that title had just failed less than 5 years earlier. I am sure the "nothing to lose" scenario was on their minds. And it sure paid off for everyone.

(One thing I remember about DC's promotion of it in the books was that it was originally little banners illustrated with Robin and Kid Flash on the letters pages. And yes, they miscolored Kid Flash on them.)

It was a bit of a surprise to me when I came across Perez's earliest Avengers books and discovered them inked by Vince Colletta. It did make a huge difference. I'm pretty sure Marcos got the gig from his work with Perez on that same title. Oh, and Gene Day. There is an unjustly forgotten, absolutely brilliant artist who died way too young. They had collaborated on issues of Marvel Two-in-One prior to this, because I think I read most of them (they are in the third Essential of that title).

One thing I do enjoy about your reviews is that you are able to balance the critical demands of today with the soft tint of nostalgia without being too far in either direction.

I was wondering if this one wasn't just too far out from my usual stuff to really be of interest. I am so glad I was wrong.

Well, there's a preface in the Omnibus that's reprinted from one of the Archive collections they did of NTT and Wolfman talks about they had 6 issues minimum and the sales cratered on issue #5 then came roaring back for #6 and off to the races they went. I think I kept hopping back off and on, but it wasn't choice--the places I used to buy comics would occasionally skip a month here and there . . .it could be a pain at times.

It sure did. I have to say Wolfman had a couple interesting things going during that time--didn't Night Force roll out sometime around the time NTT launched? I seem to remember it so.

They miscoloured Kid Flash for like 3-4 issues in the book as well . . .he has brown hair for the first few issues and then poof! He's a redhead. It really was the wild west back in those days . . .

It really makes a difference early on in Perez's career, I think. About the time of Crisis he's really established enough of his style that whoever's inking him it's unmistakably him, but his work at this period is extremely inker-dependent. The Tales of the New Teen Titans are a great example--he has Pablo Marcos, Gene day, Brett Breeding, and Ernie Colon doing inks and all of them bring something to his work.

I need to find that Essential. I was really impressed by what a great team they were. It's a damn shame the Master of Kung-Fu run can't be collected, because that was where I first encountered his work.

I do my best. I can't deny that in some places these comics haven't aged terribly well, but I try to balance the two. Glad it's working!

Nah, I tend to think everything is fair game. That's how I roll, anyway.

I remember those days well, lemme tell ya. Heck, it probably took that long for the comic book hardcore to even find the darn title.

Night Force would have been...1982, I think? It has a preview in an issue of NTT somewhere in the 20s. I think we can credit DC for even TRYING something like that squarely on Titans.

Wow, I remember that now that you mention it! Thing was, that had been a recurring thing for YEARS - he had brown hair dating back to the 1960s. I think they hand-waved that he had dyed it(?). The banner was worse - they colored his mask red and hair blond! He looked like regular Flash, except not.

He has some Star Wars work that I think was in their most recent Marvel Omnibus volume, and it is truly a sight to behold. MTIO is a hit or miss title, but that volume has a higher percentage of good stuff than the first two.

I definitely like your POV. I am toying with analyzing the hell out of a book I just finished, and it will be a challenge because it is so dad-blasted unusual. Hint: Steve Ditko.

As do I. I wouldn't have done that run of early Image comics otherwise.

Yeah, but there was also the inverse of that--wherein the newsstands wouldn't pull ALL their back issues so if you looked a little bit you could find 2-3 issues of the book you took a shine to at the same time. I so miss the fun of those discoveries.

They trailed a LOT of books in NTT--Captain Carrot for one, and there's probably a couple others as well. I gotta admit, it was a damn good idea to do that.

Man, that's . . .unusual. But not surprising. I think there was a colouring error in one of the old Marvel Handbooks, and I identified the character because of that error so much when I finally saw it corrected it . . .really didn't look right, somehow.

Well, we're not done with the Titans just yet. Because guess what just got delivered to my doorstep and will allow me to write at length about the beginning of the end for the Titans? Yes, that's right: New Teen Titans: Games It'll be a hoot.

Dude, I remember buying multiple issues of the same comic, too! Sometimes, you could even find older issues at other stores after buying the current one! Damn, I miss that.

I literally hadn't thought about the mystery of Wally West's hair in years, but you piqued my interest enough to search further. As it turns out, it wasn't a hand-wave, but actual in-story canon. Go ahead, read that link and be astonished. I know I was.

I know, right? For all people say that the direct market is soooo much better than what we have now, I kinda bristle because they ignore all the workarounds we newsstand kids had to find stuff like that.

There. . .is? Good grief, I have no words. I like that Flash rings have so much room they can even stick in hairspray.